John Burnside Poems

As cats bring their smiling
mouse-kills and hypnotised birds,
slinking home under the light
of a summer's morning
...

My whole world is all you refuse:
a black light, angelic and cold
on the path to the orchard,
fox-runs and clouded lanes and the glitter of webbing,
...

It’s moments like this
when the barman goes through the back
and leaves me alone
...

If summer is conversation,
then winter is thought;
or so it seems tonight: rain in the trees
and, halfway between our house
...

To prove that nothing
really disappears
and nothing comes of nothing,
days like these
...

I dream of the silence
the day before Adam came
to name the animals,
...

No one invents an absence:
Cadmium yellow, duckweed, the capercaillie
- see how the hand we would name restrains itself
till all our stories end in monochrome;
...

It never switches off; even asleep
We listen in to gravity itself.
Crossing a field is one long exercise
in equilibrium - a player’s grace -
...

If the house in a dream
Is how I imagine myself:
room after room
of furniture no one could use;
...

Nothing is as it was
in childhood, when we had to learn the names
of objects and colours,
...